Status Updates From Expressive Design Systems

Baking accessibility into components from the start is a step to making accessible products.

Fix inaccessible low contrast colours in your theme group “so that it will permeate the entire site.”

“Sometimes the best strategy for supporting variation is to let the content speak.”

“A component or pattern is only as good as the guidance that explains how to use it.”

Purposeful, reusable, and flexible - 3 virtues of good design components. They “should solve a specific problem … work for multiple use cases … [and] work in many different contexts “.

Be responsible for design and technical debt every time we create and maintain one-off components, also known as snowflakes. There is also ongoing overhead throughout the life of these one-off components as we iterate the smaller atomic components that the snowflakes are composed of.

Watch out “for different language describing the same task, which can also lead to confusion.”

“Start with your purpose” before creating style guides or component libraries.

“Your purpose statement describes what your team is trying to achieve with the design system.”